Australia is such an unwelcoming country it's embarrassing. I suspect it's island mentality. At the airport we treat all arriving passengers as criminals - guilty of some terrible crime until cleared with a fully cavity search.
To all our visitors - past, present and future - I apologise for our stupid bureaucracy and politicians. Once you get out of the airport things do get a little better.
I'm not sure how it is for non citizens, but for citizens its incredibly easy. Scan your passport, go to the facial recognition gate and you are through. If you have nothing to declare you can pick up your bags from the carousel and head on through.
The first time I went through the facial recognition it had issues recognising me and I had to queue for 10-15 minutes, but when I went through 2 years later (having been in a motorcycle accident 24 hours earlier with a smashed up face, beard and not having showered in 36 hours) it worked flawlessly.
Honestly most countries are like this if you have to speak with customs. The US has been my worst experience and I use to cross into it frequently. At least with epassports these days I generally don't even have to talk to anyone when I arrive in Sydney except the guy that checks if you need to have the dogs sniff your bags.
> I generally don't even have to talk to anyone when I arrive in Sydney
I always have to speak to a customs agent when traveling to Australia. My passport and all alternate photo ids are pre-big-bushy-beard, which throws the facial recognition kiosks for a loop. I made the mistake of trying to joke about it to the customs agent one time, and I remember her raising her eyebrows at me and calling over a supervisor.
The grandparent's comment is pretty descriptive of my experience at the Australian border.
> At the airport we treat all arriving passengers as criminals
How many borders is that not descriptive of though? The US border even fingerprints people now.
The closest I've come to not being treated like a criminal are borders in SEA where the agents only spoke a few words of English so they may have looked at me like I was a criminal but couldn't really say it in a way I would understand.
